Posted on 02/12/2014 4:57:29 AM PST by Marcus
Now that Robert Park is in the winter of his life and James Van Allen is dead, an unlikely person named Charles Seife, not a scientist but rather a professor of journalism, has taken up the banner of the jihad to destroy NASA's human spaceflight program.
In an article in Slate and a later post on his personal blog, Professor Seife compared the space agency to a Panda, cute but in danger of extinction. The reason, he suggests, NASA's "fixation" on human space flight. Like Van Allen, Park, and a slew of politicians before him, Seife would see NASA's human space flight ended and space exploration solely conducted by robots.
(Excerpt) Read more at voices.yahoo.com ...
We should have robotic exploration, but that shouldn’t exclude human space flight. “That’s one small step for R2D2” just isn’t the same.
Agreed. There is a lot of new tech out there that can be real game changers. Just look at the robotics being developed for military applications that are designed to work in cooperation with humans.
The mars rovers show the problem of robotics alone. The distance means that every inch a rover moves needs to be plotted in advance and then assessed and reassessed before the order is even sent. Then the rover creeps to its next destination and sits waiting for its next order. Everything the curiosity rover has done since landing on mars could have achieved in hours what it’s done in more than a year if there were a human a few miles away sending real time commands.
The value in sending humans is in our purely human traits like curiosity, intuition, and ability to reason. If a rover saw a coke can laying on the surface of mars it would just be another rock. A human will immediately understand the great implications of it.
Why excerpt your own stuff?
The author will have to enlist more Martian voters to sustain his position.
Mining?
The payback curve is long and shallow.
Tourism?
A few rich folks gawking without prospect for establishing a profitable enterprise?
Defense?
Manned has no prospect of making it better.
Just like MLK who wanted handouts over NASA spending.
Thanks cripplecreek.
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